Since september I am a student. A part time health and science technology student at the ETH (in English that would be Swiss federal institute of technology, which sounds almost scary) in Zurich.

The title of the post can be misleading and this double life isn’t as thrilling as the one of a superhero, but there’s still a lot of interesting, amusing and curious things to write about.

For starters, how does that work being a student with all the trainings, camps and races?

First of all, there’s no attendance requirements (and anyway, as my mom said: at uni it’s not skipping class, it’s priorisation). Then, elite athletes can do the bachelor in 5 years instead of the normal 3. In addition, all the material (slides, script, exercices, corrections, videos of the lecture for some of the courses, …) is on the internet. Last but not least, I’ve always been really good at learning alone, and I don’t really need (nor have the time, with trainings and everything) to physically go to uni. Most of the time I hate computers (I mean have you ever seen me printing something? Probably not because I gave up on trying a while ago), but I have to admit that it is an amazing chance.

Being both a student and an athlete makes me use my time differently.
Weekends? Not really different from weekdays: eat-train-eat-study-train-eat-study-sleep-repeat.
Forget student life with parties and drinking wine at 4pm on a Tuesday in the school cafeteria (not joking, I was catching up on a math lecture and people were happily drinking at the other table). Sunday is just that annoying day where shops are closed and if you are in Nowheresville and forgot to buy enough food, you just can’t run to the airport’s or main station’s supermarket (long life to Geneva airport’s and Geneva main station’s Migros’, which are almost always open and have saved me more than once, #bigcitylife), you have to eat pasta with oil morning-midday-evening. Happened to me. Twice. Third time’s the charm.
Holidays? Forget about them: if there’s no school, I have to catch up on what I’ve missed or train harder, and if it’s April, rest month, I have to start prepping the end of semester exams, which are in August (seriously ETH, what is wrong with you? Why take our summer holidays away?).
Restdays? More like studydays. I’m actually more tired (but in new stuff overdosis kind of way) than after a really hard training day.

Being a student means that I get to use the excuse «I can’t, I have to study» to get out of doing something I really don’t want to (dear students, don’t pretend you haven’t used it, because we all know that’s a lie). Sorry not sorry, don’t blame the player, blame the game. Although most of the times I really do have to study, because that system of linear equations isn’t gonna solve itself, those enantiomers aren’t gonna draw themselves, that data set isn’t going to analyse itself and that Matlab-programm isn’t gonna write itself (wouldn’t it be awesome if they all did?).

learning

Biathlon on TV at the uni

Student welcome package

So far, my favourite thing at uni has been the sport center, to which students have free access and the Käferberg hill behind the Hönggerberg campus where you can go on really nice runs and where I’ve seen a doe once. Duh, what did you expect, that I would say that the 8am math lecture was my favourite thing?

I’m actually really happy with my choice of studies, even if I weren’t an athlete I would have chosen the same thing. I know a lot of people that didn’t study what they really wanted to, because it wouldn’t have worked with the trainings. I’m lucky that my choice is compatible with elite sports.

I can use a lot of what I learn in my athlete life. For example, I can say that my performances of last winter are like the complex numbers. They don’t exist in the real world. But I’m like a proton. I stay positive (ok I’m done with the awful wannabe sciency bad puns).
Since I’ve started uni I’ve spent an unusually big amount of time looking at science memes on the internet (“hello procrastination my old friend, I’ve come to spend time with you again“), so I guess the mean kids who called me a nerd in primary school were maybe into something. Joke’s on me.
When they put salt on the rollerskiing track in Realp because it got under 0 during the night, all I could think about was that NaCl that has a cubic closest-packing type of arrangement when cristalline. There was one two-hour training where for some reason I couldn’t get cyclohexanes out of my mind. That time we talked about sport nutrition, everytime a sugar came up (glucose, fructose, starch, and so on), I was trying to remember whether that was a monosachharide, disaccharide or a polysaccharide.

Jokes aside, the first year, called “base year”, is pretty general with maths, chemistry, statistics, bio, informatics and other stuff like that, but later there’s going to be a lot of more interesting classes, like anatomy, nutrition, exercise science, … I took exercise science already this semester and it’s amazing! We are going to do a training plan based on existing research and there’s nothing I love more than proving people wrong by showing an irrefutable proof.

Going from high school to uni is already a big change for anyone, but I managed to make the change even bigger.
In high school, I went to school almost every day, now at uni, in the first semester I wasn’t at uni for more than two weeks in total (basically, if you follow me on Instagram, and if you don’t, you totally should, I think I made a story everytime I was at uni, so…), which obviously means a lot of self-studying. The way you’re taught at uni is already different than high school and all of it made me change pretty drastically the way I learned.

My high school was in Geneva and everything was taught in French. Now I’m in Zürich, almost 300kms from home and everything is taught in German. By the way, I might be good with languages, but best way to completely short circuit my brain is: previous knowledge in French, power-point or book in English, lecture in German.

So the first semester was a bit scary, because I had to discover how university works and what kind of learning strategies are the best. I didn’t really know if I was learning enough and in an efficient way.
But the first exam is now done, and although I showed up to class only twice, I still managed to get a really good grade, which gave me a lot of confidence. It got me wondering why do people even go to class if there’s no attendance requirements? Especially in the classes where the video of the lecture is on the internet the next day. There’s no way I’m going to a lecture on Monday morning at 8am, if I can watch it the next day cozy at home at a 1,25x speed.

But maybe that’s just me and it will certainly change after the big general first and second year classes. And anyway that’s future’s Elisa’s problem.